Democracy without sound grabs

It's a Monday-night council meeting and councillors at the City of Greater Dandenong in south-eastern Melbourne are talking about pollution levels in their municipality.

Paula Scanlon, 20, is watching the proceedings with interest. But she's nowhere near the council chamber in Clow Street, Dandenong. She is sitting in the comfort of a friend's place in Noble Park, watching the meeting live via a webcast.

Scanlon has become a regular viewer of the council meetings after stumbling across the webcast link while browsing through the council's website a couple of months ago.

"I actually like it," she says. "It's pretty educational."

Greater Dandenong has been streaming council meetings via a web link since the new council was sworn in last March and, according to the Municipal Association of Victoria, is one of about six Victorian councils that have implemented webcasting systems. A further 14 councils are expected to have webcasts of their meetings up and running within a year.

At Greater Dandenong, the average number of online viewers for each meeting has been about 120 - that's not bad considering the public gallery usually seats about 50. Some meetings have attracted up to 1000 web users.

The Mayor of Greater Dandenong, Cr Kevin Walsh, says the webcasting is aimed at giving more people the opportunity to access council meetings.

"Quite clearly some people have difficulty getting to council meetings and it's an opportunity for them to be able to view proceedings from the comfort of their own home," he says.

Federal Parliament has webcast its parliamentary sessions and committee hearings for four years and the Queensland Parliament provides an audio webcast.

The City of Botany Bay in Sydney's south introduced webcasts for its council meetings and committee meetings last year. A spokesman for the council, Brian Dale, said numbers watching the webcast varied, with some meetings attracting hundreds.

"Every now and then we would get someone from Canada watching," Dale says. "We thought why would someone from Canada want to watch our council meeting? Then we worked out each council meeting is opened with a prayer and the minister who does it regularly had relatives in Canada."

The MAV's manager of sector development, John Hennessy, describes webcasting as a "powerful tool" to enable greater community involvement in local government. "With up to 1000 people tuning in to some council meetings now, the long-term implications for greater community interaction with local government are quite significant and this is of real relevance for e-democracy," he says. "This brings the whole thing to life ¤"

While webcasting government meetings is only one of a number of ways in which governments of all levels are hoping to use technology to increase participation - others range from such simple things as posting general government-related information or documents on the web for public comment through to providing for online feedback and using online voting systems to encourage more people to vote (not such an issue in Australia given voting is compulsory) - it is one of the easiest and most cost-effective technologies to implement.

At Greater Dandenong, the initial $8000 implementation involved the installation of two cameras, which, because of Greater Dandenong's use of two council chambers in Dandenong and Springvale, are portable.

"We've set this up with little IT help, so it's very easy to do," says Adele Evans, team leader for online resources at Greater Dandenong. "We manage it and maintain it and run it and my IT background is very limited."

At the Wellington Shire, based around Sale in Victoria's east, the webcast facilities include a chat function. The shire's customer services manager, Colin Adams, says that as well as viewing council meetings on the internet, interested people can pose questions at the end of each meeting.

At Wellington Shire numbers watching the webcast have peaked at 160 for a meeting, with the lowest number watching any one meeting aboaut 30.

Those behind the webcasts say that, as well as a greater sense of transparency at council meetings, internet streaming is ideal for reaching people who may not be able to attend them.

Wellington Shire, for example, covers 10,000 square kilometres, which means some people, such as those living in Yarram in the shire's far south, face substantial journeys to get to meetings in Sale. Yarram Standard News editor Michael Giles is among those who used to have to travel from his home in Leongatha for the council meeting at Sale each month. Now, instead of spending up to three hours in the car for what could be a one-and-a-half-hour meeting, he can simply log on to the internet from his office.

"I get an excellent live feed ..." he says. "And if I happen to miss it that night, I can click on it and watch it in a couple of days' time.

"For a fairly simple set-up, they've got a very good result."

Whether webcasting meetings actually results in more people watching the democratic process in action is difficult to gauge.

The assistant director of broadcast and digital media projects in the Department of the Parliamentary Reporting Staff in Canberra, Leang Ly, suggests the main audience for federal parliamentary webcasts - which attract about 15,000 hits a week during parliamentary sessions and broadcast via seven simultaneous channels - are lobbyists, the media and bureaucrats.

"It has changed the way people do work," Ly says. "They used to come to Parliament House to watch and now they can do it from their desk."

Witness, for example, reports in May 2000 that so many staff at the Civil Aviation Safety Authority were thought to want to watch their bosses appearing before a Senate estimates committee that they risked jamming the organisation's website and, according to reports, prompted then chief executive Mick Toller to block staff access to the webcast.

Ly says expatriates also want to see what is going on in Australia. He says he has received numerous requests from overseas for an archival system because of time differences - something Ly describes as being the "next step" in the implementation of the system.

Melbourne University academic Dr Peter Chen is studying Victorian councils' use of webcasting for the MAV and says the immediacy of local government means it is the prime place to see what effect webcasting has in terms of opening up the processes of government to a new audience. "If any level of government is going to get a yield out of webcasting, it's got to be local governments as opposed to national governments," he says.

Chen says the jury is out on whether webcasting government forums encourages more people to watch the democratic process in action.

In Victoria a discussion paper released by a State Parliament committee last year said that while "it is clear that netcasts of parliaments will never have a huge audience ... they can be important for people who want to know what their representatives are doing and why they are doing it".

The paper, which was released by the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee as part of its inquiry into electronic democracy, noted that the use of technology such as webcasting could mean information gatekeepers - such as the media and interest groups - "may find their intermediary roles challenged or bypassed". It also suggested that as the concept of electronic democracy grows, so too may the spread of incomplete or unreliable information.

"Netcasting is one way that Parliament might use to provide people with more accurate, balanced information," the committee, which is due to report next March, noted in the paper.

It has been suggested that, particularly at a local government level, the recording and streaming of meetings could lead some councillors to act more professionally in the knowledge that the proceedings may not only be watched live by anyone connected to the net but will also be available via archived copies.

Dr Mary Griffiths, a senior lecturer and head of communications and writing in the arts faculty at Monash University's Gippsland campus, believes the webcasts could have an impact on politicians' conduct. "The minute you turn a camera on or stick a microphone under their nose, they're very careful," she says. "It would probably assist in bringing a little bit of gravitas to the meeting in the sense that this is history being written as you speak and therefore perhaps some of the volatility and some of the naked aggression might go away."

Griffiths sees communications technologies opening up opportunities for greater participatory democracy. While webcasting is "still very much about representative democracy" she says point-to-point technolgies will allow such things as e-petitioning and citizen panels where experts and other citizens thrash out an argument and present a report on the topic.

But Griffiths warns that, while politicians around the world have begun to adopt new technologies to help with accountability - some in the US, for example, keep weblogs or online diaries - this may encourage greater use of "spin".

Webcasts give it straight from the pollie's mouth

Short of sitting in the House of Representatives or the Senate yourself, watching Federal Parliament via a webcast is the closest you will come to experiencing the real thing.

Not bound by the time constraints which limit television and radio broadcasting, webcasts are a continuous live feed of raw debate, straight from the politician's mouth to your computer desktop using a Windows Media Player.

Streaming vision and sound across the web is the latest in a long line of techniques used by democracies such as Australia to provide the public with accurate reports of what is happening in Parliament, and while the official record is still provided by Hansard, watching an unedited webcast does have some advantages over reading a transcript. A sometimes unedifying experience, a webcast nevertheless lets you witness the tone and bearing of MPs as they deliver their speeches.

Tracing its origins back to the early 19th century when the first structured attempts to record the proceedings of the British Parliament were made (Thomas Hansard was given the contract to print the debates in 1812), Hansard - which is also used in Canada as well as Britain and Australia - is actually not a verbatim report of debates.

For a start, the "ums" and "ers" and repetition you might hear in the chamber are excised as the speeches are transformed by editors from the spoken into the written word.

There is also an opportunity for MPs to make corrections. Given proofs of the reports - known as "pinks" in the upper houses of

Australia and "greens" in the lower houses - they may make minor changes to "clarify" their speeches, although they cannot alter the meaning or sense of what is said.

Dr Peter Chen, of Melbourne University's Centre for Public Policy, says that while "theoretically" a webcast can be a much more accurate record of a Parliamentary debate than Hansard, the importance of such a record depends on whether the observer is interested in the debate, or its outcome. And editing, he says, must always be carried out according to established procedure. "Editing is always a political issue and can be a concern."

NEXTACCESS

Fire up your browser to monitor parliamentary and council proceedings at these websites.